“Black Panther Party Free Breakfast Program” by Lea Joseph: A Sneak Peek from “An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping”
For over two years, Thick Press and Chris Hoff (aka The Radical Therapist) have been working with over 200 collaborators in social work and family therapy; art and design; body work and witchery; organizing and education, and more, to create An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping, now en route and available for pre-order from Thick Press’s website. In an effort to spread the word about this world-making project — and digitize some of its longer essays so they are more accessible to practitioners and students of “helping” — we offer this fourth “sneak peek” of one of almost 250 encyclopedia entries. Enjoy!
Twenty-six years before the United States Census Bureau began collecting well-being statistics on children, and 43 years before the Census included a question on food security, the Black Panther Party (BPP) started a free breakfast program aimed at school children. In 1967 in the United States of America, a Black family was two times more likely to fall under the “poverty level” than a white family. Despite the Great Migration — a pure collective effort to seek a better, more just future — Black Southerners were finding the same oppression, neglect, and violence in their new Northern and Western cities. This dissatisfaction prompted Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale to create an organization wholly for the people. Rather than debate in ivory towers of academic institutions, the aim of the BPP was to educate and radicalize the Black proletariat, the people in the streets.
Though the Black Panther Party has come to be known for armed patrols and open carrying, this characterization is at best a disappointing oversimplification and at worst, a deliberate dehistoricization that prevents the BPP’s more meaningful efforts from inspiring others. In fact, much of the Black Panther Party’s actions centered around alternative community services. These acts of mutual aid, dubbed “survival programs” (also called “service to the people programs”) consisted of a range of services operating at different capacities, depending on the needs and abilities of each BPP chapter and the communities they served. In total there were about 20[1] programs operating across the BPP’s 45[2] chapters.[3] This included an employment program, medical research clinics, land banking, clothing and shoe donation, plumbing and repairs, and legal aid. The four defining programs of the Party, such that they were mandated by the Central (Oakland, CA) branch to be included in every chapter were: liberation schools, free health services, police petition dissemination, and the Free Breakfast for Children Program. Each of these programs address the BPP’s founding document, the “The Black Panther Party and Program.” Written in October 1966, the ten-point program included the right to quality housing, a fair trial, clothing, food, and a life free of violence and harassment from police.
After the ten-point program was written in 1966 and before the first Breakfast Program’s launch in 1969, the BPP focused much of its action on armed revolution. Newton believed the imagery of armed Black men and women, which remains iconic to this day, would draw media attention and serve as a recruitment tool. The California State Assembly retaliated with the passage of the Mulford Act in 1967, which banned open carrying of guns in California and thwarted police patrols. BPP leadership then looked to more long-term actions to support Black liberation. Survival programs — of which the Free Breakfast for School Children Program was the first — were meant to provide the basic support that Black people lacked in a hostile country. With these supports, Black people could reach the consciousness necessary for armed revolution. Newton used the metaphor of a lifeboat to describe the programs in his autobiography Revolutionary Suicide: “A raft put into service during a disaster is not meant to change conditions but to help one get through a difficult time…. In themselves they do not change social conditions, but they are life-saving vehicles until social conditions change.”[4]
The first BPP Free Breakfast for School Children Program (FBSCP) launched in January 1969 at St. Augustine’s Church in Oakland, California. Though only eleven children attended the program’s first day, 135 children were showing up for breakfast by the week’s end. The FBSCP was launched in tandem with two other “survival” programs: The Black Panther Free Clinics and the Liberation Schools. The Breakfast program launched after BPP community outreach, led by Bobby Seale, revealed a need from Oakland parents for support with morning childcare duties, particularly providing breakfast and helping children with their homework. Official BPP releases refer to oppression hunger. Thus, the FBSCP functioned as a corrective to the ways in which American racial capitalism kept Black people weak, tired, disengaged, and disadvantaged. According to academic research that arrived decades after the FBSCP and official Party publications, feeding children improved their school performance, while informal history lessons improved their sense of self and engagement in community.[5]
Just as armed self-defense was once a defining action and powerful recruiting tool for the party, so, too, were the FBSCP and other service programs. Soon after the Oakland program’s success, FBSCP’s became mandatory at every BPP chapter. By November 1969, fifteen chapters had breakfast programs. At its peak, the Party was serving 20,000 children a day across the United States.[6] Breakfast programs were open to children of any race and usually included escorts to and from the program site, a hot meal, help with homework, and Afrocentric teachings. Women streamed into the party and by the 1970s, more than half the BPP members were women. The Breakfast Program was volunteer based. Party members had mandatory duty, and much of the coordination, donation collection, and cooking were done by female members.
But, with every progressive action, there was often a repressive government response. The very same year that the FBSCP launched, the FBI set its sights on the BPP as part of its far-reaching counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) under J. Edgar Hoover. Between 1968 and 1971, the FBI launched over 200 initiatives against the Black Panther Party in attempts to strip the party of money, personnel, credibility, and political will. The FBSCP was a main target of Hoover’s as he feared its potential to attract a wider audience to the Panthers. Hoover, the FBI’s director until 1972, explicitly recognized the political and organizing potential of the FBSCP; he described it as the “greatest threat” and the BPP’s “best and most influential activity.”[7]
The scale of violence and repression faced by the BPP at the hands of local police and the FBI can seem unfathomable now. Supplies and donations were often confiscated. In New York City, police officers would “drop in” on the Program in an attempt to intimidate children and party members; false information regarding the BPP’s intentions and the safety of the food they served were disseminated by the FBI. In Chicago, cops damaged and urinated on donations on the FBSCP’s very first day. Across the country there was mass arrests of influential organizers; and days after a fundraising rally to launch the Iowa Breakfast Program, the chapter was bombed.
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I would argue that more than armed patrols, the FBSCP was a true example of an alternative future. Care and support were provided without a threshold of need like those of traditional government social supports; put simply, children were fed if they showed up. Their families were not scrutinized or stigmatized. This was the strength of the FBSCP — its holistic understanding of welfare, its connection of Black liberatory thought and action, its unyielding belief that simply providing and educating is all that is necessary to open oppressed people’s eyes to their circumstance.
[1] This figure is taken from the Huey P. Newton Foundation document “The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs.”
[2] This figure is taken from Heynen (2005), “Bending the Bars of Empire from Every Ghetto for Survival: The Black Panther Party’s Radical Antihunger Politics of Social Reproduction and Scale.” See below for an elaboration on the nature of these statistics.
[3] The BPP was an organization operated by young people; their records were not meticulous, thus some estimates may put the figure as lower or higher. N.D.B Connolly places the figure at 38 in his entry on the Party in the Encyclopedia of Chicago. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/142.html.
[4] Newton & Blake, Revolutionary Suicide, 322.
[5] Chapman-Hilliard & Adams-Bass, “A Conceptual Framework for Utilizing Black History Knowledge as a Path to Psychological Liberation for Black Youth.”
[6] National Museum of African American History and Culture, “The Black Panther Party: Challenging Police and Promoting Social Change.”
[7] Quoted in Power Hungry by Suzanne Cope (2022).
Lea Joseph is an aspiring urban planner with an interest in Black liberatory practices within the urban environment.
